


Build God and then we'll talk

by lc2l



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Fast Cars, Gen, car building, mechanic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-19
Updated: 2015-07-19
Packaged: 2018-04-10 04:00:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,126
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4376456
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lc2l/pseuds/lc2l
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cars break and blow all the time, there's never enough to go around. It's test number two: build a car that won't blow until you're witnessed racing down Fury Road. Build a car before the lumps at your neck can suck you dry and leave you forgotten.</p>
<p>Want to make it to Valhalla, you gotta die on the road. You gotta make it to the road.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Build God and then we'll talk

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks so much to [Laria Gwyn](http://archiveofourown.org/users/lariagwyn) for reading this and fixing my mistakes <3 
> 
> This fic contains some implied offscreen violence.
> 
> Title shamelessly stolen from a Panic! song.

Thing is, cars break and blow and there ain't never enough to go around so you make it out of training, you survive right through training and you're top of your everything first in line for the holy gates and you don't get a car. Boss man laughs at you when you say you want a car. Throws you a wheel, points at a carcass just dragged in from the desert gutted out from the inside all burned and crispy, tells you you know where the junkyard is.

Your car don't got an engine, got three wheels all on the one side, got a stain on the back seat all grey and slime-like and it won't run. It's test number two, build a car that won't blow the minute you start the engine. You survived training, you fixed a war rig engine hanging underneath while the road was kicking up on your back and the wind was blowing through your hair. They said it would kill you or make you and that's the day you were made.

Now you gotta do your own making. Half the cars on the road are built by pups right out of training. Over half don't make it to the road.

Bottom of the scrap heap, under three dead shells you might be able to scratch an engine out of, there's a face. A tiny person face that doesn't squish when you squatch it. You tilt it back and forth and watch its eyes open and close, sleeping waking.

Bit of hammering and a weld torch - it don't squatch like people do, but it flows like silver in the flames - and it sits flush in the middle of your wheel, eyes welded open to watch you work. "We're gonna build a screamer," you tell it, fidgeting chunks out of engine number one and scratching them clean on the sand floor. "Gonna be the best damn screamer on the road."

~

Night sky goes from big moon eye to nothin-but-sparks and you got three engines broke down to tiny pieces spread out on the floor of the kind of cave nobody even bothers to overlook. You ain't been for water in a few sleeps but you ain't dead yet

Three of your brood have already finished. You stood up on a rock to watch 'em receive their prized can of guzzoline, tip it into fresh build engines, hit the gas and send the sparks flying. One of 'em managed to drive off the lot, other two left craters. One didn't even manage to explode, just sputtered peacefully into silence and the assembled crowd tore it to shreds, bits of steel and chrome and skin flying everywhere.

"Bossman wants an update." Slit tosses a can at your head. Water tastes like gas and iron, could just be the air. "Suppose I tell 'im you took his parts and now you got a pile of smaller parts and still no car."

Pike's car made it off the lot but sparks were flying from every orifice and every time it hit a rock the whole frame juddered. "All the cars blew."

Slit grins wide. "Better to blow on the road than burn out in the tunnels, brother." He crouches beside the pile of ex-engines. The wheel watches him and you put down the can to watch him too. He picks up a fist, turns it over, "This important?"

You shrug. Ain't no concern of a lancer how the car runs, ain't no concern to anyone that every time a car blows that's ten more parts can't be used again and it ain't like anyone's building more. Engine needs fire and fists, everything else is smoke and sand. "It'll help."

He drops it back down next to its brothers. "Are we gonna blow?"

You smile now, taste silver on your lips like a promise. "Gonna blow so bright the road will Witness us."

You throw the empty can back and he catches it easy, two handed, grins back. "I'll tell Bossman you're still going." He ducks out, lets the scrap of leather fall back over the opening.

You pick up the fist he dropped, turning it over. Engine got spiked up and fired, fists all covered in junk and scars. Gotta be smooth to punch, gotta be clean.

Wheel watches you with his big unclosing eyes and says you gotta do what you gotta do.

~

Nearest sandstorm is sitting pretty fifty clicks south, you can see it from the top of the rocks, see it clearer from the polearm where Slit has tied himself up and is still clinging on for dear life as you swing the car around.

"You're a crazy fucked up sonofabitch," Slit calls on a woop woop rush of glory. He must've got the words from a bossman cause ain't nobody got a clue what they mean.

"If either of us is crazy it's you for going up the Skunk-ass pole." Gotta scream over the engine roaring at ten clicks a minute, fists pumping sparks flying. Gotta scream cause when Bossman realises you ganked the polearm's car right out his nose you gonna be straight to the pit no hesitations and there's no point screaming when you're not getting to Valhalla either way.

"Rocket never did this when Colt was fixing their car. Ain't no one ever done this for a car."

Colt's car hit a shunk rock thirty clicks south of the war and blew itself into fragments. Another speederbox, engine, wheel frame no one was gonna get back. "You wanna keep your tongue, keep your mouth shut. You got my parts?"

Slit releases the pole with one hand to shake the sack down at you. "I know you love my to-"

The car passes full throttle across the line and into the sandstorm.

~

You're welding up a speederbox while Slit cuts patterns into your chest with a chunk of metal he found on the floor. You could tell him that it's a sealing panel, gonna be vital to the gas tank by the time you're done but you don't.

Seems fitting, that some of your blood gets welded into the engine along with the parts. Slit got his cheeks slashed open when he arrived home, his whole body blasted grey by the sandstorm and he was twitching so bad he didn't hit a target for a week.

All your parts have perfect Slit handprints embossed on the surface where he held them up into the barrage of sand to blast them smooth.

~

Moon's back again, watching you over Wheel's shoulder while you build a speederbox onto the main shaft, welding teeth onto steel and watching them close. Slit comes in with water and black marks all across his arms. He's taking beatings, won't say why. Speederbox can stand alone while you take the gas can and tip water over your face, into your mouth.

Slit spins the engine shaft, listens to the whispersoft of the engine turning. Your sandblast fists run up and down silent as spiders, smooth as water down the cliff. Ain't got the rattle, the scrape and first time he saw it Slit frowned said it's too quiet, ain't no way it'll work and you had to say over over how it'll be quicker, it'll be better, you're gonna nitroboost it to gun the engine right through the silvershine gates and it's gonna take it.

Now he just spins it, looks around the room for changes. He looks at the engine block that you cut open 'cause the engine didn't fit so you're building your own space, the lances scattered all around the walls waiting for a car to line them all onto.

The gas can runs out quicker than before. Before Slit leaves, you'll be thirsty again but it's easier to push it down to where the hunger's hiding when Slit isn't here and it's just you, Wheel and the car.

Slit picks up a bird skull that you attached to a bracket and spring at least three suns ago now. "This bit, what does this do?"

You're not sure. It looked at you on the scrapheap and told you to build it. "It's important."

Slit pokes his toe at the teeth you're welding onto the speederbox. "You don't got much more time, Nux. They're all creepin' around, pokin'. The boys just wanna know if you think you're better than them but Bossman is impatient, Bossman thinks you ain't got nothin’."

You switch the speederbox between settings, watch the teeth clunk together down the shaft. You got a damn sight more than nothin', but not near enough. "Need more parts. Need a car."

"No way. Ain't the deal, we build it, yeah? You got all these-" he kicks the door plate. "Got the pieces, right? You just stick 'em together and we're silvershiny." They teach lancers to weld up cracks in the engine and turn a wheel if the heat of the moment calls for it. They don't teach them how to merge fire and steel into a line of fists that pump wheels round faster than thought.

You spin the shaft, picture it with flames licking up and over it, watch the path of sparks. Wheel's watching 'em too, Wheel knows. "'s not enough. Ain't gonna fly."

"Don't need it to fly, it's just gotta roll. Come on, Nuxbro. You built this spinner, yeah? You can build another one, you wanna go back into the sandstorm? We can get sand, all the sand you need but you gotta –" he glances at the scrap of leather over the cavemouth, scratches the back of his neck. "Running out of time, Nuxy. Rest of the brood's blown or on the road and you still got our car scattered all over the floor."

You wanna die on the road, you gotta make it to the road. Lift your hand to touch the spots on your neck where it's getting hard to feel anything. The engine whispers to you. Spin of the shaft, pumping fists, can't you hear it?

Slit waves a hand across your face. "You gotta let doc take a look at you, Nux-like. Y'aint right."

~

You spend three moons on the scrap pile to find spinners that ain’t full of sand, hoard them in a fist-shell like water, run your fingers back and forth over them, cataloguing them over and over until you know each one by the sound it makes when brushed by a fingertip.

Doc says you're dying, but ain’t everyone? Gotta go faster, gotta blow sooner, gonna die on the road, gotta make it to the road.

Slit draws faces on the bulges on your neck, traces them with a finger. "Larry," he says for the one on your shoulder that is always black and blue from being knocked by the car base as you slide back and forth underneath it. "And Barry."

Barry is the one that presses on your neck and tells you when you can and can't breathe. Barry is a sonovabitch if ever there was one. Your half life will be half as long as anyone else's, doc says, and that's all on Barry.

("I'll put you on the list for a bloodbag," Doc said when Slit threw you over his shoulder and dropped you bodily on the doc's floor. "But you'll probably be dead before we find one, they don't just crawl out of the desert you know.")

Thinking about futures is a waste of nows. The Imperator said that when they threw you out onto the bonnet of the war rig running at full clicks on half an engine. You asked if anyone had ever survived it and they said thinking about futures is a waste of nows.

Then they said 'now fix my goddamn engine' and you did. Burned your palms clean off, got sand falling out of your back for weeks and Slit whacked you round the head and called you 'idiot' but you fixed the engine. Next day they said you're done, you finished, you're a driver. Go build yourself a car.

"In Valhalla," Slit says, running a finger round Barry's throat like he's thinking of slicing it. "At the great fountain in the warrior's hall when we sit at Immortan Joe's right hand, Larry will bring you food and Barry will pour water down your throat."

Slit sees Valhalla every night when he closes his eyes. He comes in with the sun and tells you stories of the great hall, the way that water flows freely and there's green for every warrior. How everything you fight in life comes to serve you in glorious death. How you get to serve the Immortan and he will look into your face and witness you, shiny and chrome. Slit describes caves bigger than mountains, silvershine walls and floors smooth as guzzoline.

You have never seen what he sees. When you close your eyes all you see is wind whipping past your face, silver spray out like mist, sand and steel and the long ride of Fury Road.

In Valhalla, Larry and Barry will serve you to suffer for their failure to suck the life from you. If you die glorious in battle, witnessed, on fury road they do not win.

The car must be finished.

~

The engine doesn't fit in the car. Makes sense, cause the engine would power a war rig with all nitros boosting but you threw the car body into a corner at the start and never really considered sizing it up and now you got the car all ready to go but it ain’t got walls cause the engine's too big.

Still got to do something about the exhaust pipes stacked eight high like feathers, still got to connect up the gas lines and fit the wheel and there's rumours of a big raid coming up – the underlings are muttering, the bullets are running low, the war rig was being tanked last time you saw it with enough guzzoline to get to Bullet City and back three times or more.

The Imperator snarled at you when you paused to look, your arms full of bits of pipe and wire for building sparkers. It's the war rig that you fixed, way back when. You wonder if anyone went in to finish it off since, or it it's still got a dodgy engine on the right side. They snarled at you again so you didn't stop to check, took two steps at a time back to the cave and sat in the dark until your six sparkers gleamed like diamonds.

It's Slit who makes it. Can't tell anyone, cause Lancers ain’t supposed to interfere with cars but sometimes a driver's gonna be like 'we need a whole new bodywork that'll fit the engine' while a Lancer sees right through the problem and just grabs a saw off the toolbox and starts cranking the whole thing in half.

You're not actually sure when Slit went from 'sometimes watching you build the car' to 'helping you build the car'. You know when you started he was here less. He took you to the doctor. One time he burst in, white skin flecked red and said "Have they found you yet?"

You were stacking gears for a speederbox, waved your hand at the toolbox. "Wrench."

Slit looked at you long enough for you to shake your hand again, then he kicked the whole box towards you, rust red tools spilling out across the sand. "They ain’t gonna get you, okay? I'll tell 'em we need more time."

His skin was white and black more than white, maybe. After that there was always a spare pair of hands to move engine blocks and to hold things steady when your whole body was rattling as though it was already on the road. He left sometimes, because there was water and sometimes there must have been food because your stomach stopped screaming for attention.

Everyone who finished training when you did is in pieces or on the road. In the nights when you were building sparkers by touch, Slit sat at the cave mouth with a shard of metal sharpened to a point and watched the night. There's a lot of people looking for parts, a lot of people who think if it takes you a full moon cycle to build a car there ain’t much point in you still using parts at all.

Slit's taking a saw to your car like he's got something to prove, like he's cutting through the necks of everyone who left so much as a grey mark on his skin. You watch him for a moment, wonder if you should offer to help, should point out that there's gonna be a million gaps where the sand'll get in.

Not that Slit's gonna care, no one who swings from the top of a pole in a sandstorm's gonna be bothered by grains on the seat, in the eyes, in the engine. No one who stood between you and the world while their car came together three weeks slower than anyone else's is gonna listen to reason now.

Instead you pick up the exhaust pipes and the welding torch and start bending them into wings.

~

Slit falls asleep, but you don't. It's started to feel like you can't, like when you melted Wheel's eyes open, somehow you did the same for your own. Maybe it's Barry, holding you together and tearing you apart. Moon is bright again, shining through the car sized opening in the wall, enough light to attach the main body section, cut panels out from the bonnet and use them to seal up the gaps as well as you can, attach the wings onto each side and pour nitro siphoned off the war rig's into the boosters.

You can't breathe, really, but maybe it's like water and food and they just say you need it but you can get by without if you're working enough. Barry feels bigger, there's a smudge of oil that makes it look like he's watching you, the moonlight turning his smile into a promise.

Gonna die on the road, gotta make it to the road. In Valhalla, Barry will cool your engines and hold together your pipes. In Valhalla Larry will be your lancer all the way down the greatest road race anyone has ever seen.

No. Wait.

You work the front of the car on as best you can, lining up the radiator panel with the engine cooling. Use sections cut off the main exhaust lines days ago to patch the gaps where the pipes don't reach. Slit built his own lance holders, and you fixed them when he slept. They go on last, bolted onto the back where he'll be able to reach them. He talked about adding a pole, like one night in a sandstorm is enough to make a polearm from a warboy. You broke the skylight attaching the body and didn't bother fixing it, just knocked out the worst of the glass. If he can get a pole, you can add a pole.

The front piece is by the wall. Slit built it silently. Just came in one day with cuts you didn't give him running red across his back and sat down and built it. It'll throw off the speed and the turning, but you weld it on strong enough that it'll take your body weight hanging off it.

There's a pressure on your throat, like someone's standing on it and you're on the ground by the car, face in the dirt. Maybe it's Barry, in his big black boots pushing you down. Gonna die, gonna – gotta make it to the road.

You pull yourself up on the lances of the front piece, jam the wheel covers into spaces just about the right size and your welding torch is spluttering from lack of fuel, you're sputtering out like a light but you get both wheels on, watch the welds cool from sun red to silverblue and shiny.

Watch it cool from bits to something else, something new and then you can open the door, dents the wings because there's never enough space and you sit down and you're in the car.

Wheel looks up at you. Well? It says. Did you do it?

Fastest goddamn car on the road. Gonna die on the road, gotta make it to the road.

Doesn't matter about Barry holding a spiral spring around your neck, gradually getting tighter. You got a car, you've got a car. And everything's gonna fall into place. You'll take the vanguard in the greatest battles, be witnessed silver and chrome on Fury Road.

Gonna fly, Slit. Gonna fly.

You weld the birdskullspring onto the dashboard, watch the plastic melt around it. It swings back and forth and watches you. Skull and Wheel. Larry and Barry. You and Slit. Two by two by two.

Fastest car on the road. Four nitro boosters, six fists punching, give it a gallon of guzzoline and see how it runs.

You gun the boosters and it roars, sound echoing around the stones and for a moment you think the whole cave is shaking. Sometimes they shake and tremble and fall.

Slit sits bolt upright, a moment of terror and then he sees you in the driver's seat and his face falls into a grin. He runs his hand across the silverblue curved up over the wheels, curves his hand around a lance, puts one foot on the wing and hauls himself onto the roof, dropping in through the skylight like there was never any question of a door.

He's grinning like waterfalls, like green places, like a hundred clicks a second down Fury Road. "We got a car, Nux."

You run your hands across Wheel, look out the windscreen out the cave towards the horizon. "Best damn screamer on the road."

Your throat closes up like a throttle and just like that you're falling into Wheel's unblinking face.

~

Everything comes in flashes. Barry grins at you whenever you open your eyes, but you can't shut them. There's a war rig gone rogue (got a dodgy engine on the right side, does anyone know? Do you know?) and they need all the cars. You took Wheel out from Slit's hand, they're hooking your bloodbag onto the lances at the front, feeding the blood cable back to you so you can open your eyes and think.

Tilt you forwards, eyes open. Tilt you back, eyes closed.

Every car that isn't scraps is riding wheels raw. You've got a full tank of guzzoline, four nitroboosters ready to go, Slit standing up in the skylight screaming challenges to the sand and the sky. Four wheels hit the road and you're upright, eyes open, no more flashes. In the middle of the crowd your engine is crowing. Next to you, Ript and Kuz are bouncing like a bird skull on a spring, but you're running smooth, springs you spent days loosening up taking the brunt of every rock, roll and ruin in the road.

Slit is laughing out loud, the Doof Warrior plays a sound that sounds like a battlecry and you crank the speederbox up to torque. The blood running down wires into your skin is bright red, it makes you feel strong, like roaring out a challenge to the road, like racing under the red sun sky.

Barry is quiet, finally. "Ready?" you call up to the sky, to Slit roaring with a lance held up in one hand.

"Witness!" Slit screams. "The fastest car on the road."

You hit all four nitro boosters at once. The engine screams, but she can take it. You built her one piece at a time to take it. Any other car would be heating up, friction tearing it to shreds, another blow and broken pieces shattered out across the road.

But you. You drive. Faster, faster, cars blurring to each side as you pull out in front of the other new drivers, in front of last year's stock. You pass the doof wagon, the speakers burning war cries down under your skin. You pass Immortan Joe and Slit is screaming, slamming hands, lances, feet against the roof. "He saw me, Nux he _saw me!_ "

The great Immortan is watching you, watching your car and even that pales into insignificance as you pass the polearms, you pass the front guard, you break out of the pack entirely and it's just you and Slit staring down the long, empty road.

Throw the engine back into power and you're riding the wind, a full contingent of warboys at your back and an endless road stretching out before you.

_Witness me_ , you think, or maybe scream

and drive.


End file.
